Year 421 of the Dragon King Calendar, winter in the Northern Territory.
That familiar, nauseating sense of weightlessness struck again, as though some unknown entity had seized his soul and hurled it into an unknown void.
His consciousness plunged into absolute darkness and silence for an instant that felt both eternal and fleeting.
When light and his senses returned to him, everything around him had changed completely.
Cui Ciyou drew a deep breath, and cold, fresh air flooded his lungs.
So cold...
The air carried the scent of damp earth and the cool fragrance of pine needles, a world apart from the dry, scorching air of the Begaritt Continent, laden with dust and sulfur just a moment before.
He opened his eyes, and what greeted him was... ruins...
Through the gaps in the ruins, he could see...
Not an endless golden desert and red rocky mountains baking beneath a blazing sun, but a vast forest blanketed in pristine snow.
Tall, straight conifers towered into the sky, crystalline icicles hanging from their branches.
Tiny snowflakes drifted down from the gray sky like willow fluff, silently clothing this tranquil world in an elegant mantle of silver.
The three of them stood inside an ancient ruin, surrounded by broken stone walls and collapsed columns, while the shattered dome overhead divided the sky into irregular shapes.
Beneath their feet, the magical radiance of the enormous, intricate teleportation Magic Circle slowly faded into silence.
This was the Crosscut Mountain Range in the Northern Territory of the Central Continent.
A world utterly unlike the Begaritt Continent.
"Th-this place is...?"
It was... Roxy.
She looked around, her intelligent blue eyes filled with astonishment.
One second, they had been in a desert beneath a scorching sun; the next, they stood amid ice and snow. Such a drastic contrast